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Difficult Women

"Award-winning author and powerhouse talent Roxane Gay burst onto the scene with An Untamed State and the New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial). Gay returns with Difficult Women, a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection. The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail. A pair of sisters, grown now, have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children, and must negotiate the elder sister's marriage. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A black engineer moves to Upper Michigan for a job and faces the malign curiosity of her colleagues and the difficulty of leaving her past behind. From a girls' fight club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other, Gay delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July"-- Provided by publisher.

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From the title, I thought this might be about strong (and not so strong) women trying to make it in the world of men on their own terms and with as little injury and trespass to their bodies and souls as possible (hence being labelled "difficult women" for not being compliant), but it is, rather, about women with serious mental health/self esteem issues who purposely choose to be abused and neglected. The stories are not told in a way that elucidates such things, or invokes compassion, but more as a lurid show-and-tell of just how perverse the author dare go. It began to feel more and more contrived and hollow with each story, and exceedingly dreary. I soon reached a point where I could no longer stand to be so pointlessly and repeatedly battered - unlike many of the characters - and stopped reading.

This book is just story after story about victimized women. I had only read Roxane Gay’s non-fiction before this, and I much prefer that. The honesty and wit she shows in her essays aren’t always present in these short stories. There were some standout stories here, but other stories start to blur together or are too fantastical.

Difficult Women is one of those short story collections that is incredibly raw from story to story. Many of what Gay's heroines portray are women who are "difficult" in the sense that they are unconventional, not following specific female binaries, and they are intense. Some of the stories are very heartbreaking, tragic, others are hopeful. There's an honesty in Gay's writing that makes each story compulsively readable. If you like short story collections, this is a great read.

athompson10
May 01, 2017

Varied collection of short stories, some with a fantasy/fable-like atmosphere. Apt title, as all the stories have strong, interesting women who are dealing with their choices, often involving bad choices with bad men. Lots of violence, sex and alienation, but despite that it's not a depressing collection.

At first, I wasn't certain about the format, but after a few chapters I felt myself wishing for more information on each of the "difficult women." While a lot of this book was dark, I found that it was also very beautiful. No matter how much of a stretch each situation seemed to be, I felt like it was possible for each of these women (and men) to be real, aside from two chapters that felt more sci-fi than the rest. But even those chapters were gorgeous.